For modern data communications, a plurality of network technologies enabling wireless networks or fixed line networks may be deployed. Such networks may in some cases not be reliable, such that data or information, respectively, is lost during transmission. In particular for multimedia content, a graceful quality degradation may be acceptable in the event of such information loss during transmission. To this end, MDC aims at achieving an acceptable quality degradation by generating a plurality of mutually refinable descriptions of a single signal source. These descriptions are transmitted from an encoder to a decoder, typically independently of each other. The descriptions have the property that generally any subset of the descriptions may make a reconstruction of the source signal possible. In particular, the more descriptions are available to the decoder, the better the reconstruction can be. As a consequence, MDC facilitates multiple quality levels depending on a state of a transmission channel of an unreliable communication network.
In conventional MDC decoders, the source signal may be reconstructed based on any possible subset of descriptions. The estimation of the source signal may be based on a minimization of a mean-squared error (MSE). However, the quality of reconstruction depends on a bitrate, at which the descriptions are transmitted, wherein a reconstruction quality increases with increasing bitrate. The usage of MSE may be perceptually motivated only at low distortions or equivalently at high bitrates. Hence, for lower bitrates, an obtained perceptual quality of the reconstructed signal using an MSE may be insufficient.
Furthermore, statistical properties of the signal source may be lost or altered after reconstruction with a mean-squared error-based scheme. This may further negatively affect the quality of the reconstructed signal.